‘What Happens Next?’: Can We Take a Bite Out of Food Insecurity?

Susan Carland: Welcome back to “What Happens Next?”, the podcast that examines some of the biggest challenges facing our world and asks the experts: What will happen if we don't change? And what can we do to create a better future?

I'm Dr Susan Carland. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

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Ros Gleadow: When someone comes into a hospital and they're haemorrhaging, you can give them a blood transfusion, but the best thing is to actually stop the bleeding. So to me, the number-one thing is we absolutely have to stop carbon emissions.

Ian Carson: So if we can reduce food waste, we can all actually reduce CO2 emissions, and we can feed people who are hungry, and we can reduce water usage. So the benefits are enormous.

Liza Barbour: We're all active players in the food system, so we need to demand more localised food systems and we actually have a lot of power to do that.

Sue Kleve: It's not a response that fits with one, shall I say, government department, or one area of government, or one area of society. I think collectively we all have a role to play.

Susan Carland: In our first episode on the future of food, we discussed why more people are experiencing food insecurity than ever before. Australia's food system is wasteful and the global food system is badly broken due to the effects of climate change, political unrest, COVID recovery and more.

Today, you'll hear more from some of the change-makers on the front lines of food: the people working to improve the underlying causes of food insecurity, provide emergency food relief, and even shape the future of agriculture.

First up, Professor Ros Gleadow. You met Ros in our last episode, but I'm going to let her introduce herself again because you need to hear this.

Ros Gleadow: My name's Ros Gleadow. I'm a professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University, and I'm a plant scientist. And I study the effect of climate change on plants that can kill you.

Susan Carland: One of Ros' pet plants is cassava. She told me it was domesticated originally in South America, where they've been eating it for thousands of years. These days, it's also the staple crop for about 40 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa.

Ros Gleadow: It's everywhere and it's eaten increasingly in the Pacific, where it is to some extent displacing taro in part of the diet.

Susan Carland: And my understanding is that cassava could be a really useful crop as climate change becomes more of a problem and the planet starts to warm. Is that correct?

Ros Gleadow: It's a fantastic crop for tolerating high temperatures. Not very good at high salinity, so not good where the sea level rises, so some parts of the Pacific. But very good at high temperatures, very tolerant of drought, so it's a fantastic crop like that. The downside is that it's poor nutritionally.

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Susan Carland: Are there any other downsides to cassava?

Ros Gleadow: It produces toxic cyanide.

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Ros Gleadow: Quite a lot of plants do that, but cassava's the only staple crop that can kill you if it's not processed properly.

Susan Carland: Do you think that, as we start to see cassava perhaps used more globally as climate change increases, that there might be the risk of increased cyanide poisoning in the population?

Ros Gleadow: A billion people eat cassava every day, and every day probably somebody, I'm sure, dies from eating cassava. And certainly, there are thousands and thousands of people with a disease called konzo when people eat a lot, so during the harvest season. It's much worse during times of drought and also during times of political conflict. And the reason for that is, well for drought the plant is actually making more cyanide and is more toxic in itself, but also there's less availability of other foods. So cassava is a great food for carbohydrates. If you're just looking at food security from a point of view of enough calories, yeah, it's good, but it needs to be eaten with other things that have protein that enable you to detoxify the cyanide. Because your body can detoxify cyanide, but you need protein to be able to do that.

Susan Carland: How would you define food insecurity, Ros?

Ros Gleadow: So food insecurity in the technical definition, my understanding is, not having a reliable source of food, but it's not just number of calories, the food has to be suitably nutritional as well. So you need to have a balanced diet. So food security is to do with the availability of food, the ability to access food, stable supply of food. So food may be available, but if you don't have any money, or you don't have transport to get to markets, you may be food insecure.

Susan Carland: If we're going to feed the next generations, we'll need to rethink our agriculture, starting literally from the ground up.

Ros Gleadow: It's important to think we can't just grow more food and take more land because we have to really work out how to increase productivity of food crops, and improve efficiency of food chains, and reduce waste in order to make sure we don't take more land. Because we need to preserve biodiversity. There's a lot of... Apart from itself – biodiversity has a right to exist – but also disrupting biodiversity increases the chance of those diseases jumping from animals to humans. We have a disruption to climate, we have all kinds of things. So I think the balance there is very important. There's two types of farming in the world. There's the smallholder farms which actually accounts for more than half of the world agriculture, and they can be improved in efficiency by adding fertiliser and more, better varieties. The other is the big broad acre farming, and that's been fantastic for really big production of food and has been the result of the Green Revolution. But what we really need is improved efficiency of using fertilisers exactly perfectly, harvesting exactly perfectly. And there are a lot of new technologies out there, robotics, detections from satellites or drones that can actually... Agricultural technologies that can really monitor and deliver efficiencies that are beyond what we're currently seeing. And I think that, together with the development of very targeted, genetically modified crops that could be bred to be very drought tolerant and so on… I think there's a lot of opportunity for increasing the efficiency of production without increasing land area or increasing the inputs of fertiliser. Because that's what we need: more crop production with less inputs. And I think that that is possible.

Susan Carland: What's getting in the way of developing more of those?

Ros Gleadow: One of the handicaps that we've got in developing new crops is that there's not enough plant scientists in the world. There's quite a shortage, and a lot of countries around the world have been cutting teaching in these areas. And there's currently a world shortage of botanists and plant scientists, and particularly plant pathologists, people who work on plant diseases. And so there really needs to be an investment, public investment, in education around the world in those areas. So for the last 30 years we have about three per cent increase in crop yields year-on-year through the valiant efforts of plant breeders around the world. What we really need is more people working in that space, so more people working in plant breeding. We need people in public breeding programmes, because a lot of the space for the big crops is taken up by companies, and we need to diversify into other crops – some that are more drought-tolerant. Cassava's one, but there are many others that are very drought tolerant or very salt tolerant – and reduce our reliance on just a few crops. Three crops basically support most of the world. So there are complexities in this, but I think it is solvable. But we do have to really invest in developing the crops and in getting the systems in place. But above all, the thing driving this is rising carbon dioxide. When someone comes into a hospital and they're haemorrhaging, you can give them a blood transfusion, but the best thing is to actually stop the bleeding. So to me, the number-one thing is, we absolutely have to stop carbon emissions. We have to reduce them rapidly, and we have to be actively doing research – way beyond my area of research – to actually pull the carbon dioxide down much lower than it is today. I think those things are really crucial. We really have to do those things.

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Ian Carson: Hi, I'm Ian Carson. I am lucky enough to have been a co-founder of SecondBite and a Monash alumni. And SecondBite rescues fresh, nutritious food.

Susan Carland: So how do the supermarkets, or the markets, how do they decide what's not good enough for us to sell, but is okay to give SecondBite?

Ian Carson: So it's not really the supermarkets, it's us.

Susan Carland: Mm-hmm. OK.

Ian Carson: It's the consumers. I don't blame the supermarkets, I actually blame us.

Susan Carland: Mm.

Ian Carson: And actually the supermarkets have responded really well. If we go back 15 years, they weren't doing anything. But with us and others, they've become really part of the solution. So most of the food which gets wasted in supermarkets actually is collected now. So we've actually solved a lot of that problem. It's a great story –

Susan Carland: Yeah.

Ian Carson: – that the supermarkets actually – and a lot because their staff demanded it – have solved most of that problem, and are helping charities like us to do even more. And so now the focus is on helping the consumer to work out how they can do more, and also between the grower, the farm gate, and the supermarket.

Susan Carland: So what is happening on that journey from the grower to the farm gate? Is it getting damaged in transit? Is it the farmer saying, “I can tell no one will want this wonky banana,” and chucking it out? What's happening there?

Ian Carson: It's a combination of things. So one is, the consumers won't buy something which doesn't look right. That’s one. Two, sometimes markets that the product is being... They can't sell it at the right price, so it's cheaper for the farmer to plough it in. There are millions of tonnes of bananas which go to landfill every year because the cost of getting them to market, or they're not the right shape, et cetera… and there are more and more things being done. And then crops which fail, where the fruit isn't good enough, or it's that there're floods. We've had the recent flooding –

Susan Carland: Yeah.

Ian Carson: – and the supply chain disruption. So the last couple of years, and one of your things was COVID, there’s been massive disruptions to pickers, to transport. We've had the floods so people couldn't go and collect things. So there are a whole variety of problems, or opportunities to be solved, from the farmer through to the supermarket. And for the farmer to know that there are solutions and to have easy solutions. In some ways, food rescue at scale only started about 15 to 20 years ago. So it's not that long that we've been on this journey. And some industries have been going for 200 years.

Susan Carland: Mm.

Ian Carson: So everyone's learning how to redo the whole supply chain. The good news is that there are a lot of people who are trying to do things about this. So there's probably never been more focus on it, which is interesting, Susan, because when we started, people didn't really get it. And so we spent years talking to people about it. When I was a student at Monash University, we were looking at ways of feeding homeless people, but it's taken all that time for society to really understand how bad the problem is.

Susan Carland: What do you think happens if we don't try to address food insecurity in Australia? What do things look like in the next 20 years?

Ian Carson: Well, the amazing stat is that if food waste from the world was a… If CO2 emissions from food waste was a country, it would be the third-biggest emitter in the world. Third-biggest emitter of CO2 emissions. So if we can reduce food waste, we can all actually reduce CO2 emissions, and we can feed people who are hungry, and we can reduce water usage. So the benefits are enormous, and often people worry that individuals are powerless and can't make a difference, but actually every day, an individual can make just a little difference.

Susan Carland: Yeah.

Ian Carson: So your question was –

Susan Carland: If we don’t change, yeah.

Ian Carson: – what the world looks like if we don't change? Well, if we want to reduce global warming, eight per cent of it is food waste. So we can all do something about global warming just in our fridges.

Susan Carland: We could do something by, as you said, stopping wasting the food that we bring home, stopping buying that bag of spinach that we inevitably chuck out a week later. We can be less superficial about the produce that we buy at the supermarket, and buy the wonky banana.

Is there anything an individual like me could do to help address that issue between farmer to shop, where there's a lot of drop-off in waste there, too. Is there anything I can do in that area?

Ian Carson: It's a great question. So there's a few things that individuals can do, you could do. One is people could donate to SecondBite or other agencies. That's a really simple thing. A couple of dollars a week makes a difference because we are going to the farmers.

Susan Carland: Mm.

Ian Carson: The second thing is, we can educate ourselves on how to reduce food wastage. And if you go on the Stop Food Waste Australia website, which is a national initiative which all the food rescue agencies are a part of, that will tell you how to reduce your own wastage. Susan Carland: Hmm. Ian Carson: And then it's a matter... The other thing that we can do is grow vegetables in our gardens.

Susan Carland: Mm.

Ian Carson: I've got a friend who, during COVID, he dug up his lawn and turned it all into vegetables, and he does that with his kids now. So he is growing tomatoes, and lettuces, and cauliflowers. So growing our own vegetables is a very rewarding thing to do. And if you really wanted to, if you grow your own vegetables, you could actually donate them to an agency nearby.

Susan Carland: Mm.

Ian Carson: So that would be really, really powerful. So I think the Stop Food Waste Australia website is a good one for people to have a look at. There are also some food-sharing apps.

Susan Carland: Hmm!

Ian Carson: There's a thing called Olio and there are others where, if you've got surplus food in your home, you can put it up and people can access it.

Susan Carland: Hmm!

Ian Carson: So you can share it with other people. So there are some good food rescue apps. And I think talking about it, talking about the waste. And when you go to a shop, asking, “What do you do with your waste?”.

Susan Carland: Mm. Mmm.

Ian Carson: Because one of the reasons why, say, Cole's changed was because their employees said to them, “What can we do about it?” Susan Carland: Yeah. Ian Carson: And Cole's, to their credit, listened to it.

Susan Carland: Yeah.

Ian Carson: So if we ask the questions and people start to think about it… There's a lot happening in the space. Actually it's exciting because every day there's innovation.

Susan Carland: Yes!

Ian Carson: And improvements in what's happening.

Susan Carland: So you feel hopeful about the future of food security?

Ian Carson: I'm so hopeful and so optimistic because I think that people such as yourselves are interested in it, and they want to know how they can help themselves, and they know they can make a difference. So I think that's the great story about SecondBite and food rescue is And the really interesting thing about it is that when we started, the food industry in Australia is probably $200 billion, right?

Susan Carland: Mm.

Ian Carson: And it was a couple of Monash alumni, and a couple of others, who disrupted the whole food industry. Just imagine that! It wasn't the government, it wasn't the big supermarkets, it wasn't the manufacturers. It was a couple of Monash alumni who said, “How can we fix this problem?”

Susan Carland: Mm.

Ian Carson: And I think that's a great story. It wasn't just us, it was others.

Susan Carland: Yeah, yeah.

Ian Carson: But isn't that amazing, that individuals can make that difference?

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Susan Carland: Food rescue operations like SecondBite are a good option for short-term emergency relief, but they don't address the root causes of food insecurity. Here's Dr Sue Kleve of the Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Food in Monash University's Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Science.

Sue Kleve: This is a basic human right, and it needs to have that dignity, have that choice. And yes, there is a need for a food safety net exactly for what you were saying, in times of emergency, but as an ongoing response of what we're seeing – and it's not only in Australia, it's also other high-income countries – that this is not going to solve the issue in the long-term. So that's why it's really important that we start to really think long and hard around how can we actually address this.

Susan Carland: Mm.

Sue Kleve: Quite often the issue of food insecurity is called a wicked problem. By “wicked problem” or “complex problem”, it means that there's no one easy solution.

Susan Carland: So what are some things that you've seen either happening in Australia or around the world, which you think are really thoughtful, effective solutions to some of these food insecurity problems that you'd like to see implemented more broadly?

Sue Kleve: As I said before, there's always a place, we need a food safety net. So like a food relief safety net in that shape or form. But how that looks, I think we can actually certainly improve on that. And there's some really great examples that are starting to happen here in Australia, but also what we're seeing internationally as well. So things like social supermarkets. So where…

Susan Carland: What's a social supermarket?

Sue Kleve: Yeah, they are sort of increasing, particularly within the UK. So it's almost like this medium in between a regular sort of supermarket, but what they have is perhaps foods that may be close to use-by dates, that sort of thing. So people are able to have that choice. They're purchasing foods, there still is that variety. So there are some examples of that that are happening, and I know in South Australia they're actually kind of testing that model as part of a larger research kind of project to see how that might work. I think even in the space of our existing kind of food relief, because we know that a lot of that relies on the charitable food sector, and there is a role to play with that. But I think it's thinking about how those services are designed. Do they give people choice? And certainly through a lot of the work that I've done in talking with people around this experience, that choice is really important.

Susan Carland: There's a dignity in choice.

Sue Kleve: There is, absolutely. It's very powerful. And the fact that the quality of the products, meats, they're still fresh. They're still something that many people might take for granted.

Susan Carland: And I also imagine what people want, as opposed to being given a box of food and you get what you get... Being able to go in and choose what you want, to tick that box… We were talking about, earlier, about what's culturally appropriate just for me as an individual, or as a family. What do I want in my pantry? Not what do you want to give me?

Sue Kleve: Yes, yes. More broadly, internationally, to target some of those bigger determinants. Scotland is testing a model around what they're calling a “cash transfer to household”. So I think that's… who are living within that sort of poverty line in particular. It's also helping to support, to lift people out of that poverty thing. And I think that's something that if we look at the Australian Council of Social Service here, their Raise the Rate policy and advocacy campaign is so important. Because I think during COVID, some of those social welfare reforms that came in, we can see the impacts that had for many households.

Susan Carland: Oh yeah.

Sue Kleve: And for the first time they could afford a fridge, they could buy a freezer, they could buy fruit and veg regularly. That's the other thing too, is people having to make this... I almost call it like walking a food security tightrope. It's like walking this tightrope. So all these decisions that people are having to navigate around.

Susan Carland: Yeah.

Sue Kleve: “Well, is it the medication that we pay for? Is it the rent? Is it that big bill shock that came in? We know the utilities costs are increasing…” So it's all this navigational stress that households are constantly under and then having to think, “Well, do I do this or do I put food on the table?”. So it can be really tricky.

Susan Carland: Imagine if we don't do anything to improve food security in Australia or around the world. What do things look like in the next 50 years?

Sue Kleve: Oh, look. I'm the optimist and in my crystal ball, I would like to say that we are working, that we can put things in place. We can start to address some of those key things around ensuring people have adequate housing, people are getting a better income, employment stability. That yes, we do have those support systems there for people. I think the challenge of, if we don't start to do some of those things, is that it continually falls back on the individual. And that what we actually need, it's not a response that fits with one, shall I say, government department, or one area of government, or one area of society. I think collectively we all have a role to play in this. And I think one of the challenges, particularly for governments, is that we need to get out of this silo.

Susan Carland: Mm.

Sue Kleve: It doesn't just fit with health, or it doesn't fit with social welfare. It fits across housing, jobs, et cetera.

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Susan Carland: To take Sue's point even further, this isn't a problem for governments or scientific bodies to tackle alone, either. Everybody eats and everybody can make an impact on food security.

Liza Barbour: So my name's Liza Barbour and I work here at Monash University in the Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Food. So I'm a dietitian in the area of public health nutrition and food sustainability systems.

Our food system at the moment is predominantly this industrialised food system. We're all active players in the food system, so we need to demand more localised food systems. And we actually have a lot of power.

Susan Carland: But what can we do? What can the average person at home do?

Liza Barbour: My five top tips would be around promoting a sustainable food system. In Australia, we all need to eat less meat, we need to eat more plants. And my second top tip would be to opt for nude, kind of whole foods where you can.

Susan Carland: By nude, you mean?

Liza Barbour: Unpackaged. So there's been this massive global proliferation of ultra-processed foods, and those are those really heavily-packaged foods. They're really high in salt, sugar, fat, or they're...

Susan Carland: They’re the ones that taste amazing! [Laughter]

Liza Barbour: Exactly, all the yummy things. They're marketed really cleverly. And a third top tip is around minimising your household's food waste. So lots of things we can do there. And then number four is to put a face to your food. And this is something I talk to my kids about all the time, is, there's human beings behind the food that we're all eating. And so getting to know those people helps us really value our food. So going to a local farmer's market, or your farm gate trails, that sort of thing. And then lucky last is for all of us just to get our hands dirty. So there's no better way to understand the true value of our food than to watch how long it takes for a tomato to grow, or to prepare that soil, get it ready for sowing seeds, that sort of thing. It's a really tactile, therapeutic, beautiful thing to do to connect us to where our food comes from.

Susan Carland: Liza also wants us to start talking about politics at the dinner table – or rather, talking to politicians about the dinner table.

Liza Barbour: I would say to get involved in your local politics, which I know it sounds a bit left-of-field to start talking about politics with food, but it's all great for some of us to adopt these practices. But our food system is so disrupted that we actually need a big population shift towards more healthy and sustainable diets. And so if you can kind of advocate to your local government authority to start, the best practice is to create a food system strategy for your local government area. We've got some awesome examples in Australia. The City of Greater Bendigo has an incredible food system strategy, and they've just received a designation with UNESCO's Creative Cities in the category of gastronomy to really acknowledge the amazing work that they've done here in Bendigo. But really cool things happening overseas as well. So I guess just advocating and telling our local politicians that this is important to us. We want our kids to be able to enjoy healthy, local food as well. And at the moment, it's just not looking like future generations are going to have that privilege.

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Susan Carland: So the next time you're at the supermarket, buy the wonky banana, use the sniff test on your milk instead of going by the best buy date. And maybe get your hands a little dirty in the garden. The future may depend on it.

Thanks to all our guests on this series, Dr Sue Kleve, Liza Barbour, Ian Carson AM and Professor Ros Gleadow. Visit our show notes for more information about their work, and links to the resources they mentioned today.

And thank you for joining us for our series on the future of food. We'll be back next week with an all-new topic. If you’re enjoying “What Happens Next?”, don't forget to give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share the show with your friends.